The people around me… Jupiter’s beard, what are they wearing? Everything’s black or gray, like they’re all in mourning. Did someone important die? Is color forbidden here? They’re all hunched over, staring at these glowing rectangles in their hands. Some are moving their fingers across them, and the light changes. Are they… are they scrying? Reading omens in the glow?

I scan the metal beast’s innards and freeze. Two of these strange mourners have… by Mars, they have purple arrows floating above their heads! Like divine markers pointing down from the heavens themselves. Nobody else seems to notice. The first is a child-woman, no older than thirteen winters, with the slanted eyes of those silk traders from the far east. But her robes! Yellow like fresh-churned butter with strange knots and loops, the kind of rough cloth we’d dress our field slaves in. Her hair is bound up with wooden sticks, actual sticks! The other… gods preserve me. A man whose very clothes seem possessed by trapped lightning. Blue fabric that shimmers like the finest Damascus steel, with threads of pure light running along every seam like tiny rivers of fire. His arms bear flat obsidian mirrors that flicker with moving pictures. Omens? The underworld itself? “Salvete!” I call out. “Intelligitisne linguam Latinam?” Nothing. The child-woman’s eyes go wide as a spooked horse. I try again in Greek: “Χαίρετε! Ἑλληνιστὶ λαλεῖτε?” The entire belly of the beast goes silent. Every last person stops poking their glowing rectangles and stares at me like I’ve grown a second head.